Ubuntu font's hooked lower-case "l" is autohinted with uneven left/right space

[aschmitz]

1. Load the attached HTML file in an app that uses the Ubuntu font's manual hinting.
<https://launchpadlibrarian.net/191181257/669571-plan.html>

What you see: In the sequences "pla", "ple", "plo", there is equal space left and right of the stem of the "l".
<https://launchpadlibrarian.net/191180442/669571-hinted-manually.png>

2. Load the same file in an app that uses the Freetype autohinter.

What you see: The spacing on either side of the stem is sometimes different.
<https://launchpadlibrarian.net/191181208/669571-hinted-automatically.png>

What you should see: There is equal space left and right of the stem of the "l".

[aschmitz (aschmitz-)]

Automatic Screenshot

[aschmitz (aschmitz-)]

There's a small chance this is related to #605950, but I didn't think it was the same issue.

The debugging glyphs don't seem to be showing up - let me know if there's something different I should do to resubmit. (The problem also appeared in OpenOffice.)

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

As a quick interim answer about the debugging glyphs: the pixel-per-em ('88') display only shows up if hinting is enabled, (this glyph actually gets substituted from DejaVu Sans).

The other three glyphs with the weight and version read-out got dropped by Dalton Maag, but will hopefully be restored by some means as soon as possible (bug #640623).

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Hinting/kerning issues with the sequence 'pla' (seen in the word "plan"), this from the screenshot appears to be present, so comfirming on the basis of that. Hopefully Malcolm at Dalton Maag might be able to suggest from a quick glance what might be happening.

[Malcolm Wooden (malcolm-daltonmaag)]

This is another rasterising variation (see screenshot from my Ubuntu system next to Andy's screenshot). Perhaps with all the rasterising variations that we are encountering we should open a Bug Report on it?

It does seem to be a peculiar situation where we are hinting the font to get the best possible visual quality that some applications like Mozilla do their own rasteriser configurations and undermine all our hard work. :-(

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Malcolm is right, this is a problem with the autohinter, not with the manual hints.

[Hugh McMaster (hmcmaster)]

Closing. Fixed.